


The Existential Crises of Certain Celestial Beings

by themousewitch



Series: accidental blessings [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale breaks up with the philosophers, Being Ineffable, Crowley making Aziraphale swear, F/M, Finally, Focused on Aziraphale/Crowley, If HOAs existed in England they still wouldn't happen to Crowley, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Newt and Anathema's bizarre and wonderful relationship, R. P. Tyler's begonias, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 06:48:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20403436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themousewitch/pseuds/themousewitch
Summary: Aziraphale wreaks havoc on local weather systems and his own well-being.Crowley, being a reasonable demon, helps.





	The Existential Crises of Certain Celestial Beings

“I think she’s planning a wedding,” Newt said one day from behind the counter.

“Oh?” Aziraphale said absently. He’d just finished Heidegger and was vaguely angry with a good portion of humanity over it. He was looking forward to Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.

The village of Tadfield did not know it, but they were all looking forward to Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. Tadfield had, six months ago, abruptly stopped enjoying the absolute perfect weather for the time of year and started to enjoy the kind that was altogether too wet and too cold.

“Anathema,” Newt pushed on. “I think she’s planning a wedding. Our wedding.”

“And?” Aziraphale asked testily. He was contemplating destroying Heidegger’s work out of spite and weighing that against his (relatively) unconditional love of books and his long-term discomfort with incomplete collections.

The shop door opened to admit Crowley, who blew in like a bird of bad omen. It was raining outside but Crowley remained quite dry, as the rain fell obediently _around_ him.

“Heidegger?” Crowley demanded, tumbling down next to Aziraphale with a takeout bag that smelled, well, _heavenly_. He took the book from Aziraphale’s hands and replaced it with the bag. “Here, I come bearing sushi. Stop this right now, we both know it’ll come to no good. Pulsifer? Is this your fault?”

“Um,” said Newt.

“I can read what I like,” Aziraphale protested. That was part of the problem, really, if he thought too long about it.

“I’m gone for a few days and look what’s happened. Heidegger. Honestly. You know, I really did think better of you,” Crowley told Newt, who looked somewhat disconcertedly concerned.

“It’s no good, I’ve already read it,” Aziraphale said glumly. He was wondering if he ought to ask if the fish was ethically sourced, or if it was better to seize a good thing when he saw it.

In the end, several dozen very surprised fish appeared in the Pacific and swam their separate ways.

\--

“How was London?” Aziraphale asked much later, after a meal that had restored some of his good mood. He and Crowley had wandered back downstairs to the reading area of the bookshop. Aziraphale staunchly refused to think of it as a lobby and had aggressively discouraged others from doing the same.

It was difficult enough keeping regular hours, which was something he had found himself doing to avoid Newt asking if Aziraphale was doing all right and offering to work extra hours if he needed the help. It didn’t hurt that the shop had become a regular stop for the Them.

If God didn’t have anything better for him to do, Aziraphale had privately decided he ought to remain available to Adam and the others who had been there at the end of the world. Even if the children didn’t remember it, they had each faced down the monsters of humanity and watched Satan himself rise howling from the tarmac.

Aziraphale hadn’t had much to do with Lucifer before the Fall, but he did vaguely remember the short temper and penchant for dramatics.

“It was London.” Crowley waved vaguely. “Anyway, there’s a cottage here that’s just come up, and I thought maybe you’d want to come look at it? I ought to have somewhere, now the flat’s uninhabitable.”

“It’s probably perfectly safe. You wouldn’t get, um, hired and then murdered. That’s not how—”

“Your side works?” Crowley said, raising an eyebrow.

“I was going to say that’s not how the Almighty works,” Aziraphale finished, stung.

There was a moment of silence between them, into which Newt leapt like a startled and suicidal deer.

“What did you do in London?” Newt asked.

“I glued a whole lot of convenient coins to a whole lot of inconvenient things,” Crowley said, grinning, and he didn’t bring up the cottage again, so Aziraphale didn’t either.

Kierkegaard wouldn’t … well, Kierkegaard could wait, technically, but it wouldn’t do to put these things off, Aziraphale decided. If he was to be a protector of humanity, he needed to have some faith in them.

\--

“Are you planning our wedding?” Newt asked the bathroom mirror. The mirror didn’t respond. Newt sighed. There was nothing to do but ask, he’d decided

“I am,” Anathema called from the other room, startling Newt enormously. “Should I stop? Is it too much? I just want to make sure there aren’t any problems with me staying here, and Agnes’s package said ‘Mr. and Mrs. Pulsifer.’”

Newt took several deep breaths and decided he did not need to ask how many times she had overheard him in the mornings.

Agnes had addressed the package to Mr. and Mrs. Pulsifer. There was no way the old witch had meant anyone but Anathema. It could have been a joke, but Anathema didn’t give the impression that Agnes had been the joking type.

“I suppose it makes sense,” he said, eventually. He opened the bathroom door.

“It makes sense?” Anathema asked tartly. She was seated on the bed, surrounded by several very expensive looking dress catalogues.

“You didn’t even propose first!” Newt protested.

“That’s fair,” Anathema said. As he watched, she turned the pages of three of them and regarded the contents with skepticism.

“I have to go to London today.” Discussing weddings, Newt decided, would probably land him in more trouble than it was worth. Besides, it _did_ make the strange sort of sense that everything made these days.

“Oh?” Anathema asked, not looking up.

“Aziraphale asked me to check on his shop in Soho.”

Anathema looked up.

“He asked me to pay the rent,” Newt admitted. “And not to even think of selling anything. Also, I love you.”

Anathema’s smile was something out of the Greek histories, Newt thought. A man would go to war for a smile like that.

“I love you, too.”

In Dorking, Newt’s mum began to hum a merry little tune for no reason at all.

\--

Aziraphale read Kierkegaard. He read Schopenhauer. He read for another week’s worth of foul weather. Crowley was tired of it. It was difficult to terrify the neighbor’s begonias when they were already half-drowned.

Crowley haunted the bookshop and he haunted the cottage (which had, overnight, decorated itself in various shades of grey, defying several hundred years of color in the brickwork), and he waited for something to happen. It had been six months of philosophy, and Aziraphale was due to explode any day now.

Crowley wouldn’t admit to any concern for the humans around him, but he did concede that Aziraphale would probably regret traumatizing any of them. The angel had taken to carrying candies in his pockets for the children. It was ridiculous.

Crowley watched Newt doodle on the notepad at the counter, and something occurred to him.

“Why did you stay?” Crowley asked.

“Huh?” said Newt. Aziraphale ignored both of them.

“Why did you stay here after everything? You could both have moved on with your lives without remembering any of it: Lucifer, the Horsemen, all of it. So why stay?”

Newt considered this, which was one thing Crowley did appreciate about the boy: he wasn’t an idiot.

“I’ve spent most of my life not believing in things,” Newt said eventually. “Not for lack of trying, it’s just most of what I was supposed to believe in was rubbish. I want to believe in something that isn’t rubbish.”

Maybe the boy was an idiot after all, Crowley mused. Some idiots came very well disguised.

“You wanted something to believe in. So, what? Now you believe in God and Satan and all of that?”

Newt shuddered. Crowley supposed the memory of Satan had been more glossed over than he’d thought.

“I suppose I must,” Newt said eventually. It nearly had the timbre of a question.

Aziraphale shut the book he was reading with a crack like thunder. Crowley sat up. Things were getting interesting.

“No, you musn’t!” Aziraphale cried. “That’s the whole point. You don’t _have_ to believe in anything. You have free will!”

“Ohhh, here it is,” Crowley said to himself, and everyone ignored him.

“You’re supposed to have the choice,” Aziraphale continued miserably, relentlessly. “We’re not. Oh, bugger all this. I’m taking the bus to London.”

“What did I do?” Newt asked a moment later, after Aziraphale had, well, stormed out into the storm.

They both watched as Aziraphale sketched several sigils irritably and the rain abruptly stopped. The cloud cover remained, looming ominously over the town. Aziraphale snapped his fingers and sunlight broke through the clouds.

Things were looking up for Crowley and down for his neighbor’s begonias.

Crowley watched Aziraphale stomp off towards the bench and wondered if he ought to follow or at least offer a ride in the Bentley. “It’s not you. He’s just an idiot.”

“But he’s an. He’s, uh –”

“Being an angel does not preclude being an idiot,” Crowley said, and then because he knew it would jar more distressing memories loose: “You met Gabriel, remember?”

He ought to offer Aziraphale a ride, Crowley decided. That’s what one was supposed to do in a relationship, he reasoned, even if it wasn’t what you’d call a conventional relationship.

Crowley pulled the Bentley up to the bus stop. “Oh just get in,” he said, and for once—for _once_—Aziraphale did as he was told.

\--

There was something—well, a lot of somethings, if Crowley was honest with himself—immensely satisfying about making an angel swear.

Crowley had not driven to London. He had driven to his own nearby cottage and ushered the angel in question inside with the kind of stern look that worked well with delicate flowers. Then Crowley had shoved Aziraphale against the bedroom wall, licked his neck, and proceeded to do everything in his power to coax as many curse words out of Aziraphale as possible.

So far Crowley had managed two and he was feeling terribly smug about that as he rolled over and told Aziraphale, “You know we wouldn’t get this without at least some free will.”

Aziraphale covered his face with his hands, scrubbed at it for a bit, and Crowley observed that he at least had the grace to look _embarrassed_.

“I do realize that, yes.”

“Now.”

“Now,” Aziraphale agreed irritably.

“The whole world wouldn’t even exist if we hadn’t made the choice to defy Heaven and Hell and possibly—”

“_Possibly._”

“The Almighty Herself. Oh, all right, it could have been ineffable. Are you happy?”

Aziraphale sighed. “No.”

“I’m going to start taking this personally, you know,” Crowley said sourly. The euphoria of the afternoon’s exertions was starting to wear off.

“It has nothing to do with you,” Aziraphale protested.

“Really.”

“Truly.” Aziraphale pulled Crowley forward into a long kiss.

“Then what?” Crowley asked, mollified. “What’s so terrible about being able to—oh, this is about the sword, isn’t it?”

Guilt set up camp on Aziraphale’s face and prepared to toast some marshmallows.

Crowley propped himself up on an elbow. He’d had six months to think about this, although he was admittedly less concerned with any possible wrongdoing than Aziraphale. Crowley was more concerned that over the course of 6,000 years, he might have done the right thing as often as the wrong one. He was also somewhat concerned as to how his newest employer might view that, though he’d tentatively decided that, being a reformed demon in the employ of the Almighty, it might very well play in his favor.

“I gave them the sword. I gave them war,” Aziraphale fretted.

“You gave them the choice,” Crowley countered.

“How many times—”

“You’re already forgiven,” Crowley told him. “God would never have spoken to you otherwise. Look, everything you did, you did for the sake of Her beloved humans. Shouldn’t that count for enough?”

Aziraphale, doubtful, opened his mouth to respond and Crowley broke out the metaphorical big guns.

“Look, if you’d never chosen to give the sword away, we’d never have got on as well as we did and we wouldn’t have thwarted Armageddon. Humanity invented War. Whatever sins the sword’s been used for, none of them would matter now if the world hadn’t kept existing.”

“I suppose …” said Aziraphale. He was wavering. Crowley nearly had him.

“And me. You wouldn’t have me. I wouldn’t have you.”

“Dear boy, you know that’s not what—”

“And I love you,” Crowley said desperately. The moment the words left his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He was a demon. Loving anything but mayhem and skullduggery was just embarrassing.

That was Aziraphale all over, though. Embarrassing and awful and still somehow unbearably precious to Crowley.

Aziraphale beamed like he hadn’t spent nearly half a year wreaking havoc on the local weather systems.

“I love you, Crowley,” he said, and kissed him before Crowley could ruin the moment.

\--

“I don’t know how you’ve done it, Adam Young, but I’ll be talking to your father about this!” R.P. Tyler cried a few days later as the Them rode past on their bikes.

“Ignore him,” Pepper said, earning another meaningful look from the old man.

“It had to be Adam,” Tyler said, almost to himself. He’d had a difficult fortnight.

His new neighbor and the antique car that was parked in the drive looked terribly familiar, and even if he couldn’t quite place why, there was enough residual outrage to confuse and annoy him every time he looked at the pristine Bentley.

Plus, his begonias had wilted. He was almost positive they were _shaking_.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank all of you for reading and commenting and leaving kudos and love for previous chapters of this. This is 100% a love letter to Good Omens and also (if you're reading this) all your fault.
> 
> That's right, you have no one to blame but yourselves and tumblr user charmingpplincardigans for this. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


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